Dance Of The Warrior

Marie Brodeur's earnest, joylesshour-long NFB doc on war dances from around the world is a big disappointment. Three years in the making, it dutifully records modern-day performances of 20-plus warrior-originated dances -- everything from the Petro Red Voodoo dance of Haiti to Scotland's Highland sword dance.Though the snippets of dances themselves are fascinating, Brodeur's assembled an uneven melange of images (some sequences are appallingly filmed), and the artists' explanations of the social-political meanings of what they're doing range from informative to dull.

Instead of interlacing dance sequences with remarks by, say, an anthropologist, Brodeur employs a painter/boxer she met in Paris who paints canvases (and occasionally himself) in scenes that will have high school audiences -- an obvious target market -- howling.